Think Like a Director

If you are a real man, there are two words that should never, ever come out of your mouth. Real men never use the phrase “real man.” Haha, go ahead and light me up in the comments section. The fact that I am using the phrase “real man” must then by my own definition disqualify me from being a real man. I get it, the irony is not lost on me. I own it and I really couldn’t care less. Real man. Real...

So I was listening to Cal Newport’s podcast the other day and he mentioned he switched from using an app called Trello to an app called Things 3. It made me sad. Here is the Godfather of Digital Minimalism talking about task lists. If you have read my Field Manual, you know that I refer to task lists as “a backlog of guilt that gets longer every day.” And it makes me sad that Cal fell for this stu...

I woke up this morning feeling lost once again. I had trouble sleeping and found myself awake at 3:26 and again at 4:38. No reason to try and sleep. I started the coffee pot early. I sat with my coffee and my laptop and read some stuff on the Internet. One Substack post in particular made me stop and think more than the others. It brought tears to my eyes. It was about something that I already for...

Last week I talked about the Anechoic Hell Chamber™ of Social Media. This week I want to discuss another Anechoic Hell Chamber. Productivity. Holy cow, have we ever dug ourselves a hole with this one. Pretend you have ten children in a blended family which means you are dealing with emotions and kids and school and you have a demanding day job too. Then add onto that football practice, gymnastics,...

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées This week, I published the Think Like a Director Field Manual on Amazon’s Kindle platform. It was a pretty cool experience for me personally. If you listened to last week’s episode called “I performed all my child’s surgeries all by myself,” you will understand what a personal milestone th...

Some of you may know that I used to be the vocalist in a hardcore band. It’s improper to call me a lead singer or anything like that, because when you’re in a hardcore band, you don’t sing. You do vocals. A local newspaper called Westword once said that I sounded like Henry Rollins in the act of being disemboweled, if that provides any context for you. At the time, I was very thankful for this kin...

I was an early tech adopter. Back when PDA’s were a thing, I used to run an entire factory floor from one. I would spend a lot of time trying to optimize my workflow and thought it was amazing that I could do everything from a mobile device. Back in those days you had to use software that you installed from a CD-ROM to sync your offline mobile device to the Outlook servers. My mobile Excel file wa...

“Why are you doing that? You can’t want it more than they do. Just stop already.” My wife Jess asked me that question, and I had no answer. Someone very close to me was going through a rough time. I was helping them through it in the best way I could; by offering my support and love and care and resources. On the phone with them, texting them, checking up on them, following up with them. I was lay...

Over 500 years ago, in an old stone quarry near Tuscany, workers extracted a massive piece of marble from the bowels of the Earth. Encrusted with dirt and bearing the scars of ropes, this slab looked like any other piece of rock cut from the ground. It was heavy. It was inert. It was dragged to Florence intended for a great statue, but the stone was difficult to manage. Two different sculptors tri...